May 30, 1922 - Jenny-Wanda Barkmann
A volunteer rather than a conscript, Barkmann sought out her role at Stutthof and carried out its worst functions — brutalizing prisoners and selecting women and children for the gas chambers — with an apparent personal investment that the historical record makes difficult to dismiss as mere compliance. Her case was among the first formally prosecuted at the postwar Stutthof trials, making her an early subject of judicial accountability for concentration camp personnel. The remark she delivered after sentencing has followed her story ever since.
From Wikipedia
Jenny-Wanda Barkmann (30 May 1922 – 4 July 1946) was a German overseer in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. She was tried and executed for crimes against humanity after the war.
Biography
Barkmann was born in 1922 and is believed to have spent her childhood in Hamburg.
In 1944, Barkmann volunteered with the Schutzstaffel as an Aufseherin, a concentration camp overseer, in the Stutthof SK-III women's subcamp in Poland, where she brutalized prisoners, sometimes to death. She also selected women and children for the gas chambers. Women prisoners nicknamed her the Beautiful Spectre.
Barkmann fled Stutthof and hid in Gdańsk, where she was arrested at a train station in May 1945 for her criminal wartime acts. In 1946, she became a defendant in the first Stutthof trial, where she and other defendants were convicted for their crimes at the camp. After she was found guilty she declared, "Life is indeed a pleasure, and pleasures are usually short."
Barkmann was publicly executed by short-drop hanging along with ten other defendants from the trial on Biskupia Górka Hill near Gdańsk on 4 July 1946. Former Stutthof prisoners volunteered to conduct the executions. She was 24 years old at the time of her death.
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